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https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/jvdyaz/-/gcj7t9y

Tinbootz is a former FFG employee and game designer, you might now him as Sam Bailey, the designer of Forbidden Stars. Scroll down through the comments and he confirms both to have been laid off

 ingtaer wrote:

 Genoside07 wrote:
I hope this isn't a sign of rebooting the license,
but I am not sure what else they can do for the new products because it seems very limited to what hasn't been released yet.

For the SW games? There are tons of things still to be released for each of them, prequel stuff has not really got revved up yet (for Armada its due for release next month), sequel stuff is only in X-Wing and there is not yet a thing from Mando in any of it. Of course there is also an entirely new time period about to be released and fleshed out which will add even more options.

Yeah, im a bit confused, there are three distinct eras that can be drawn from right now, that many need to be.
Clone wars for Legion needs tons of stuff for bothe sides. While Original Trilogy they have exhausted quite a bit of the Onscreen material there is still plenty.

chaos0xomega wrote:
https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/jvdyaz/-/gcj7t9y

Tinbootz is a former FFG employee and game designer, you might now him as Sam Bailey, the designer of Forbidden Stars. Scroll down through the comments and he confirms both to have been laid off

Thanks for that, hopefully there is an error in comms somewhere as if that is true that is going to have major repercussions for those games. Will hold out hope until Alex says something himself though.

 Genoside07 wrote:
I hope this isn't a sign of rebooting the license,
but I am not sure what else they can do for the new products because it seems very limited to what hasn't been released yet.

No! There has not been a TIE Dagger for X-Wing, and I cannot accept a reboot before we get TIE Dagger! That would be unredeemable.


Dammit,l FFG, if I don’t start seeing more Star Wars ships with triangles where hexagons go, I am gonna lose it.

Oof......if the lay off is true that is a bit concerning.

Chatting around and it seems like the vast majority, if not the totality of what was FFG's OP team have been fired. A very sad and appalling decision. No further news on any of the other staff yet though.

Voss wrote:

 Monkeysloth wrote:

Voss wrote:

 Monkeysloth wrote:
Considering FFGs pretty poor history with miniature games I think people are over reacting just a tad.

Pretty sure 'overreacting' is exactly what some said when the RPG division got gutted and there was talk of FFG losing the SW license back in January. But here we are again. Somehow.

But this is nothing like the RPG stuff, which turned out to be just them getting rid of in house and moving to mostly contractors as they're still doing Genesys and L5R releases last I heard (I know there's a new sourcebook for L5R) so it sucked people lost their jobs but they didn't drop RPGs.

Firing people and moving to contractors is definitionally gutting an RPG department. [which is what I said, not 'drop RPGs.' And see below on losing the license comment

They're literally just moving things to a sister company that's focus is this type of game.

Yeah. Moving major titles (and the accompanying license) from FFG to a different company is pretty much exactly what I mean by 'hollowing out' FFG. The 'sister' company aspect provides no comfort for people who are losing their jobs or now likely have to move their families from Minnesota to Washington state.

FFG clearly doesn't have the resources to do boardgames, RPGS and Wargames as they generally only manage to get one of those any support at a given time (and it was never RPGS). You can blame Asmodee for that but the fact still remains that they were horrible supporting all 3 before the acquisition.

So it is happening, but its justified, so that's OK? I'm not actually sure you're really arguing with my points at this stage.
It certainly doesn't seem like overreacting if you're positing idea that this actually needs to happen because FFG is horrible.

My argument isn't that it's not happening but that people are claiming this will ruin FFG. Moving the RPGs to be contractors, or another sister company I read different things on the web, didn't cause FFG to collapse (my argument on the RPG was under the impressions they killed every game as that was the initial thought and about all I followed when that happened so I was wrong about this being different). Neither will this. FFG has always been a boardgame shop that flirts with other game types with rare success for those experiments. As long as they continue to make well received board games the company will be around for quite some time.

Dakka makes the joke that FFG wont support miniature games for very long before shutting them down then acts with horror as Asmodee moves all that away from the company with a horrible track record for anything not called X-Wing when it comes to miniature games and even that gravy train is over as all the talk and excitement that use to exist for the game died when 2.0 came out. Clearly Asmodee thinks that other people can do a better job with an expensive licenses, which is arguable, which is why they're not moving anyone over to AMG. This is just how large corporations work. It's not surprising at all.

chaos0xomega wrote:
https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/jvdyaz/-/gcj7t9y

Tinbootz is a former FFG employee and game designer, you might now him as Sam Bailey, the designer of Forbidden Stars. Scroll down through the comments and he confirms both to have been laid off

Oh, my! A post by an anonymous redditor! The veritable bastion of truth on the interwebs!

While I certainly hoping these guys haven't lost their job, especially the week before Thanksgiving, I prefer something more concrete than an anon claiming to be a "former employee" that "knows people" as a source.

Why is their staff getting fired so unbelievable?

It happened with their RPG department the last time this happened.

 Soundtheory wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/jvdyaz/-/gcj7t9y

Tinbootz is a former FFG employee and game designer, you might now him as Sam Bailey, the designer of Forbidden Stars. Scroll down through the comments and he confirms both to have been laid off

Oh, my! A post by an anonymous redditor! The veritable bastion of truth on the interwebs!

While I certainly hoping these guys haven't lost their job, especially the week before Thanksgiving, I prefer something more concrete than an anon claiming to be a "former employee" that "knows people" as a source.

Whilst I would generally agree with you, Sam is pretty well known and is still friends with a lot of the FFG staff. He was also the initial source of the death of FFG's RPGs and that all panned out as he said. I would give it a high probability of being accurate, especially after chatting with some (now former) OP guys.

So I am hoping for a press con soon from this new Studio on this. According to the SWA reddit, the MCP team does a great job engaging with the community base.

My Questions as an Armada/X-Wing Player:

1. Please do not move away from prepainted HQ miniatures to grey plastic PVC cheapness. The entire appeal of both X-Wing and Armada is that they're ready to go, right out of the box. This type of change would kill it for me.

2. Please no rules changes, Armada is in an amazing spot, seeing what happened with X-Wing 2.0 I have great fear about this.

3. Are we likely to see better stock, greater releases, more campaigns and the like?

If I can get answers to these, I think I'll be in a better position.

in addition to the three main eras, disney is revving up for this high republic thing, good chance to get in the door with RPG and mini game support for that

 Soundtheory wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/jvdyaz/-/gcj7t9y

Tinbootz is a former FFG employee and game designer, you might now him as Sam Bailey, the designer of Forbidden Stars. Scroll down through the comments and he confirms both to have been laid off

Oh, my! A post by an anonymous redditor! The veritable bastion of truth on the interwebs!

While I certainly hoping these guys haven't lost their job, especially the week before Thanksgiving, I prefer something more concrete than an anon claiming to be a "former employee" that "knows people" as a source.

That user is known in the community. Just because you are ignorant of that fact, doesn't make the source invalid. You can literally check his post history to verify that he is who he says he is....

 Soundtheory wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/jvdyaz/-/gcj7t9y

Tinbootz is a former FFG employee and game designer, you might now him as Sam Bailey, the designer of Forbidden Stars. Scroll down through the comments and he confirms both to have been laid off

Oh, my! A post by an anonymous redditor! The veritable bastion of truth on the interwebs!

While I certainly hoping these guys haven't lost their job, especially the week before Thanksgiving, I prefer something more concrete than an anon claiming to be a "former employee" that "knows people" as a source.

Hes not an anonymous redditor, hes done AMAs before (i.e. identity needs to be confirmed and credentialed) and has a pretty long post history including adverts for his kickstarter and other projects (which you can cross-reference with his BGG profile). I've also interacted with him on multiple occasions, including in person. So while in your opinion he's a random anon making gak up, I know for a fact that he's the real deal.

1. Please do not move away from prepainted HQ miniatures to grey plastic PVC cheapness. The entire appeal of both X-Wing and Armada is that they're ready to go, right out of the box. This type of change would kill it for me.

The former Star Wars license manager for FFG is now in charge of AMG, so I don't see this changing.

2. Please no rules changes, Armada is in an amazing spot, seeing what happened with X-Wing 2.0 I have great fear about this.

The fact that design leads (and indeed most if not all of the three games actual rules designers) have all been axed doesn't bode well on this. Designers tend to have strong opinions on how things should function or look, and there will be little to no continuity into the hands of the new team. Designers also always try to leave their mark on gak. X-Wing might be relatively safe only because they only recently released 2.0 and licensor approval might mean that 3.0 will be unpalatable to Lucasfilm so soon, the other two games are likely to see some revision. Licensor approval on Lucasfilm stuff is supposedly a lengthy process and the releases through the end of 2021 are already approved and fixed, and they have pipeline out to 2025, so I don't think a new edition will be in the works per se - BUT I expect there will be a number of rules revisions and adjustments and some level of "soft reboot" to the rules in the short term.

3. Are we likely to see better stock, greater releases, more campaigns and the like?

I don't see this changing. They are both Asmodee companies, use the same factories, suppliers, logistics, distribution, etc.

in addition to the three main eras, disney is revving up for this high republic thing, good chance to get in the door with RPG and mini game support for that

RPGs are a different studio. If theres any High Republic tie-in for the games to be released within the next year it was already developed and approved by Lucasfilm as part of FFG.

For the games, this is probably a good thing. AMG is composed of good people that have done a phenomenal job with MCP and are really passionate about game development. I think they'll do a great job with the Star Wars brand.

For FFG and its employees, it definitely sucks and is a product of the Asmodee machine that's been devouring the games industry for years. This is hardly the first and won't be the last ship they sink in the name of efficiency.

Voss wrote:

 Monkeysloth wrote:
Considering FFGs pretty poor history with miniature games I think people are over reacting just a tad.

Pretty sure 'overreacting' is exactly what some said when the RPG division got gutted and there was talk of FFG losing the SW license back in January. But here we are again. Somehow.

You know, I do seem to remember something like that

 LunarSol wrote:
For the games, this is probably a good thing. AMG is composed of good people that have done a phenomenal job with MCP and are really passionate about game development. I think they'll do a great job with the Star Wars brand.

For FFG and its employees, it definitely sucks and is a product of the Asmodee machine that's been devouring the games industry for years. This is hardly the first and won't be the last ship they sink in the name of efficiency.

It sucks for the FFG employees getting let go for sure. I don't necessarily think it is a bad thing overall, since FFG as a company was never really "all-in" on their miniatures games the way miniatures gamers expect.

I'm assuming FFG will still be producing Rebellion and Outer Rim? I've still yet to pick those up and I don't want to miss out--I grabbed Forbidden Stars right before it disappeared forever and it's now one of my favorite board games!

 LunarSol wrote:
For the games, this is probably a good thing. AMG is composed of good people that have done a phenomenal job with MCP and are really passionate about game development. I think they'll do a great job with the Star Wars brand.

with the original Designers gone and 3 more games I doubt that
not only that we can expect a backlog until the new team can handle everything, going from 1 game to 4 and doing a great job on all of them is impossible

and SW Legion is one of the best designed SciFi games around, it is not just doing a great job with the SW brand but they need to do a great job with Legion very soon or the fans will drop it

 kodos wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
For the games, this is probably a good thing. AMG is composed of good people that have done a phenomenal job with MCP and are really passionate about game development. I think they'll do a great job with the Star Wars brand.

with the original Designers gone and 3 more games I doubt that
not only that we can expect a backlog until the new team can handle everything, going from 1 game to 4 and doing a great job on all of them is impossible

and SW Legion is one of the best designed SciFi games around, it is not just doing a great job with the SW brand but they need to do a great job with Legion very soon or the fans will drop it

I do really like the core mechanics of Legion. It needs some thought on how to avoid the exploitation in building mono-order lists that leads to activation advantages being problematic, but the suppression system mixed with the orders makes for a really compelling core.

I'm in Legion for the minis so on the surface I shouldn't be worried about this - it'll still be distributed by Asmodee and you'd assume manufactured in the same way, so there's no reason to assume production will slow down or distribution will change from its currently inadequate level in either direction, but is this other company really prepared for jumping from managing one fairly niche skirmish game to four games at once? And if they have canned the development guys...eesh.

I may not personally appreciate the style of games FFG games, but they clearly have an audience and that audience has expectations. If those aren't met because the new team doesn't quite "get" FFG's style, that could impact popularity and thus my chances of getting shiny new Star Wars minis.

We'll have to wait and see I guess.

 Yodhrin wrote:
I'm in Legion for the minis so on the surface I shouldn't be worried about this - it'll still be distributed by Asmodee and you'd assume manufactured in the same way, so there's no reason to assume production will slow down or distribution will change from its currently inadequate level in either direction, but is this other company really prepared for jumping from managing one fairly niche skirmish game to four games at once? And if they have canned the development guys...eesh.

I may not personally appreciate the style of games FFG games, but they clearly have an audience and that audience has expectations. If those aren't met because the new team doesn't quite "get" FFG's style, that could impact popularity and thus my chances of getting shiny new Star Wars minis.

We'll have to wait and see I guess.

The devs may have been given the opportunity to transfer to AMG and declined (due to having to move or any number of reasons). That sort of thing happens all the time when companies restructure/rearrange offices.

Curious about the long term effects, but we won't see it for at least 6 months. Hopefully this does mean they pursue even more interesting ideas.

Limited release Clone Wars tiny scale game so you can have all those giant clone wars vehicles running around would be fun. Release it like a GW boxed game.

Hes not an anonymous redditor, hes done AMAs before (i.e. identity needs to be confirmed and credentialed) and has a pretty long post history including adverts for his kickstarter and other projects (which you can cross-reference with his BGG profile). I've also interacted with him on multiple occasions, including in person. So while in your opinion he's a random anon making gak up, I know for a fact that he's the real deal.

He certainly seemed gunshy about identifying who he was on the thread you linked, when asked who he was, he would only respond "I used to work at FFG" "I know people." Reddit AMAs as a background check, lord....

That's hard facts for ya, ha?

Look, if they fired people right before Thanksgiving, that's horrible, complete crap, and more reason to contemplate dropping the game than whatever studio it ends up with, or rule changes they may make for it. Sorry I'd like a little more that some redditor running around claiming to be an ex-employee (because they would never have an ax to grind) to confirm a company's retched behavior. It's not like game companies aren't accused of worse on the interwebs whenever they make a change folks don't like.

It seems like a Christmas tradition at Asomdee to have "staff changes" right before Christmas every year.

Here's FFG's miniatures track record from what I've noticed:

* Battlelore 2nd edition: Dropped the game line before factions were balanced.

* Star Wars Imperium: Includes a SW miniatures game.
* Star Wars Legion: A SW miniatures game. Scale not compatible with Imperium.

* Star Wars X-Wing: SW spaceship miniatures game.
* Star Wars Armada: SW big spaceship miniatures game.

* Runewars : Picked up two copies at $25 each.

And this doesn't include the other "lifestyle" games (or at least card games with several expansions) that FFG released:
* Android (dead or something)
* SW Destiny dice game (dead)
* Legend of the Five Rings (soon to be dead)
* A Game of Thrones (MM discount bin)
* Arkham Horror
* Lord of the Rings
* Marvel Champions

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2477281/why-game-not-great-success-or-it

Now, I'd agree that FFG's cooperative card games are less like conventional PvP "lifestyle" games than boardgames, but look at how many miniature games and card games FFG had, almost all of these at the same time, which were a long-term commitment by both the customer and the company. This doesn't even include their multi-expansion boardgames, such as Arkham Horror, Mansions of Madness, and Descent, all three of which have been supported and rebooted by the company over at least a decade or so.

At one time FFG had more lifestyle games than GW and WotC combined. (Maybe they still do now.) Who thought *that* was sustainable?

AFAIK, At no time did tabletop miniature players consider FFG as a miniatures company, although I dunno about SW Legion. (Gee, does a a SW Legion paint set count?) Maybe Atomic Mass will produce miniatures games more for the hobby market, and less like miniature games made by a boardgame company in boardgame plastic. Although, given the crowded hobby market, who knows how well this will work, and the future of FFG's former miniature lines...!

Who remembers the 80's??? Way back when, a certain company had several science-fiction and fantasy boardgames, including a fantasy football one. Then they narrowed down their focus to a handful of games. A more narrow focus to a line of games with a demonstrated track record is a thing, and FFG looks to be doing it -- and has been doing it -- with certain LCG's and boardgame lines.

They also had Dust tactics, Anima Tactics, Tanhouser, and a line of metal miniatures for Decent that went no where (and probably one or two that I don't know about/remember). The first two were just distribution I only I believe (though they might have been more involved in Dust Tactics). Outside of a few scattered years they've had some miniature game for like 10-15 years and had the top selling wargame not from GW for at least 2 years in X-wing (and I've read so interesting arguments from people that know the industry well that think it easily out sold GW those years) so I don't know how people wouldn't think of them as a miniature company and more then WoTC when they produced their own lines for like 10 years (both metal and plastic). Just because it's not your main focus (though it really was during the x-wing heyday) doesn't mean you're not one if you generally have always had a miniature game or 3 you're selling at the same time.

It's just outside of X-Wing they never really had luck with anything (until they shot themselves in the foot with a poorly ran 2nd edition launch). Dust did well but it's Dust so other forces outside of FFG sunk that game as it was getting popular (and every relaunch since).

But you are right about them really focusing a lot on the lifestyle games though, going after a lot of money from a small player base due to all the overlapping. Android was huge but WoTC decided to upend that by refusing to re-license the rules as they want it for Cyberpunk 2077 CCG. I didn't realize L5R LCG was ending. I thought that was the whole reason FFG bought the IP.

 ced1106 wrote:
* Star Wars Imperium: Includes a SW miniatures game.
* Star Wars Legion: A SW miniatures game. Scale not compatible with Imperium.

Please honour the fallen appropriately - Imperial Assault, not Imperium.

 Genoside07 wrote:
It seems like a Christmas tradition at Asomdee to have "staff changes" right before Christmas every year.

Also at any other time... FFG has always been very fast drawing that particular gun.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 ced1106 wrote:

* Legend of the Five Rings (soon to be dead)

Do you... maybe, have any kind of hard info about that? I mean, I am working on that line. Or rather, those lines.

Didnt they also do a Mutant Chronicles miniatures game in a weird scale too?

 bbb wrote:
Didnt they also do a Mutant Chronicles miniatures game in a weird scale too?

Quite a while ago, yes.